Oh, The Glory of The Last Page!

For the last few weeks my lovah has come to bed, crawled under the covers, turned to me and said, "You're still reading that book?" And I have answered, with a roll of my eyes, "Yes. It goes on forever. The type is small. Have you seen how large these pages are?"

The endless tome we've been chatting about is Oh, The Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey. Having finally finished it thanks to being bed-ridden the last three days, I feel a mixture of relief (thank god it's done), regret (why did I insist on reading it all), admiration (wow, Wilsey wrote a story so compelling it actually demanded a complete reading) and uncertainty (was this a compelling story?)

I bought the book because a recent New York Times book review made glowing reference to its non-stop humour and poignancy. Also, it was on sale at Indigo Books for $5.99.

At 496 pages and weighing in at over 1.6 lbs, Oh, The Glory of It All is the memoir of Dave Eggers / David Foster Wallace-contemporary Sean Wilsey. Wilsey's father, Al Wilsey, is a butter magnate millionaire. His mother, Pat Montaudon, is a larger-than-life narcissist who, after her husband leaves her for her best friend Deidre, asks her nine year old son to join her in a suicide pact.

After choosing life over death, Pat goes on a quest for the Nobel Peace Prize, leaving behind the society pages of San Franciso for dinners with Gorbachev and Indirah Ghandi. She uses children and peace messages as her props, leaving behind an increasingly troubled pre-teen Sean. Eventually Sean is sent by his father and evil-stepmother to various new-age behaviour modifying private schools where he learns to cry openly and turn away from his skateboarding, scooter-thieving ways. Of course, it takes about 400 pages for us to reach Sean's 20s.

The actual details of Sean's rebellions are typical of spoiled teenaged boys. The only significant difference is that most boys don't have fathers who fly their own helicopters or ship their misbehaving sons to an elite school in Italy.

And I think this is where Wilsey's memoir fails. While he is acutely aware of all the injustices done to him by his parents, he is seemingly oblivious to the obscene privilege he is born in to. Yes, he is denied access to most of the windfall thanks to his wicked stepmother, but in Wilsey's long-winded passages detailing his days away at school (many of those passages painstakingly dedicated to an ongoing, un-diagnosed case of crabs) he overlooks the most interesting and engaging elements of his upbringing--his over-the-top parental units.

In his descriptions of his parents and stepmother, Wilsey often resorts to quoting other sources (such as Home and Garden Magazine or the society pages of the San Francisco papers) as if by standing back he can wipe his hands clean of any accusations of exaggeration. This is pretty much the same transparent and quickly tired approach teenagers take when they are trying to defend their actions ("Dr. Phil said it's important for adolescents to earn their independence so I had to steal the car to get to the party.") It also halts the story's action and withdraws from the three-dimensional portraits of these people that Wilsey only occasionally allows himself.

Like this posting, Oh, The Glory of It All is in serious need of an editor. That said, I am sure we will see the movie adaptation any day now, with Annette Benning as the crazy mother, and Shia LaBeouf as Sean Wilsey, misbegotten rich kid turned literary darling. Until then, I'd recommend you read Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors,a memoir of a crazy childhood that did have a good editor.